This disclosure relates generally to generating metrics describing performance of an application with users of an online system, and more particularly to selecting additional applications to generate metrics for comparison with the application's metrics.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of online systems, and the significant amount of user specific information maintained by online systems, an online system provides an ideal forum for users to easily communicate information about themselves to other users and share content with other users. For example, users may share their interests with other users by posting content to the online system that is subsequently maintained by the online system and presented to additional users. Content provided to the online system by a user may be declarative information provided by a user, status updates, check-ins to locations, images, photographs, videos, text data, or any other information a user wishes to share with additional users of the online system.
Additionally, many online systems allow their users to identify and obtain various applications, which may provide additional content or additional functionality to the users. An online system may store information describing interactions by its users with various applications. For example, the online system maintains information associated with an application describing types of interactions by users with the application or describing amounts of revenue received by the application from various users. Based on maintained information associated with an application, the online system may determine various metrics describing performance of the application, such as a number of unique online system users who interacted with the application within a time interval or an amount of revenue obtained by the application from online system users. An entity associated with the application may receive or obtain the metrics determined by the online system to evaluate the application's performance.
An online system may also provide the entity associated with the application with information about additional applications, allowing the entity to evaluate the application's performance relative to the additional applications. For example, the online system computes metrics for the application and for the additional applications and provides the metrics for the application and for the additional applications to the entity associated with the application. However, different applications are directed to different types of users and have different goals for performance, so metrics of additional applications having different audiences of users or receiving different types of interactions from users may provide little information for an entity associated with an application to evaluate the application's performance.